A young Leftist, to his horror, realizes Trump is successful

I couldn’t stop smiling after reading a young Leftist’s horrified realization that Trump is a successful president who has undone all things Obama.

A friend sent me a link to an article in the online student newspaper at his son’s college. The student author, proving himself wiser than many in the adult media to which I’m sure he aspires, has figured out something that horrifies him: Trump is an amazingly effective president and he’s systematically undoing everything Obama did. Honestly, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh uproariously when reading The Trump Administration — and that heart is not mine.

Here are just a few exquisite gems from the opinion piece. I do urge you to read the whole thing. You’ll be feeling great about where we are in 2018 when you’re done.

Although student writer Matthew Raskob starts off by reassuring himself that Trump is disorganized, negligent, deceitful, and that nobody likes him, the truth quickly leaks out. For example, there’s the truth about Mueller’s failed investigation, although the student rushes to tell us that the Alinsky metric still works — even though there’s no fire, Mueller managed to envelope Trump in smoke:

Moreover, Robert Mueller’s investigation of l’affaire Russe continues apace. Whether or not it implicates the president personally, it has further cemented the perception of scandal among all but the most unctuous Trump apologists.

Before I go further, let me remind you that the above is an example of the type of thinking you get at a liberal arts college that charges more than $52,000 a year for tuition: Even though the FBI has utterly failed in its mission, the fact that it wrongly impugned someone’s character must be counted as a victory.

That’s just ephemera, though. The article’s meat is to be found in Raskob’s horror that, if you push through the slime in which Mueller is coating Trump, you find someone who has been remarkably successful at carrying out a far-reaching conservative agenda:

Closer scrutiny of the Trump administration’s record reveals a strikingly different reality. Through appointments to the federal judiciary, executive actions and regulatory policies — or perhaps more accurately, lack thereof — Trump has managed to overturn a substantial portion of Barack Obama’s legacy and shape American domestic politics and policy for years to come. Thanks to the brevity of our collective attention span, the Republican tax bill has now faded from the public consciousness, but its lasting impact upon the nation’s already grievously unequal distribution of wealth should not be underestimated. Even if Democrats regain the White House and Congress, they will find it difficult to do away with this legislation, despite the unpopularity of its specific provisions (see Obama’s extension of the Bush tax cuts). Additionally, although Trump failed to repeal the ACA, he has managed to cripple it through executive actions and the tax bill’s repeal of the individual mandate.

Let’s hope that Raskob has a long enough attention span and memory in a few months to realize that lower taxes benefit everyone, doing away with that “grievious[] unequal distribution of wealth” he decries. In this, the new scheme is distinct from the old tax scheme, which primarily benefited government cronies. (Call it “fascism lite,” if you will — a system in which private ownership continues, but profits only if it’s at government’s beck and call.)

The wailing and gnashing of teeth, of course, does not stop there:

In Neil Gorsuch, the right gained a young (as Supreme Court justices go), reliable vote for corporate power and against civil rights. In addition to the stolen Supreme Court seat, Trump has filled a record 12 circuit court seats and 10 district court seats. A few lower court appointees have been forced to withdraw due to embarrassing ineptitude or fondness for the Ku Klux Klan. But as Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick notes, it is Trump’s respected, credentialed appointees who will do grave damage to “women’s rights, workers’ rights, voting rights, LGBTQ protections, and the environment…capably and under the radar.” Unless a future Democratic administration and Congress resort to court-packing or impeachment, the federal judiciary will be flush with right-wing zealots for at least the next decade.

Strip away the hysteria, and you reach the core issue that Raskob has figured out, even if the lights at CNN haven’t yet: Trump has managed to stop in its tracks the activist takeover of the federal judicial system. With luck, the judiciary will slowly start to retreat from its current activist stance, one that sees it too often acting as a legislative branch, an administrative branch, an executive branch, and a vicious and overreaching branch all rolled into one.

If Leftists want to change “women’s rights, workers’ rights, voting rights, LGBTQ protections, and the environment,” they’ll have to stop running to activist judges and, instead, will have to convince the voters of their righteousness. Interestingly, as to all of these issues, Leftists have been unable to convince the voters, which is why their only recourse has been judges untrammeled by constitutional considerations. The same holds true for DACA, an idea so unpopular with voters, even Democrats wouldn’t support it in Congress, which is why Obama had to resort to unconstitutionally using an Executive Order to change existing law. No wonder Lefties are panicked — and, oh, how love it!

Raskob may also start to understand that true civil rights exist only when there’s minimum government control and when the government applies the law equally to all comers, rather than playing favorites. If he’s talking about the rights of people of color (and, as you know, I am among that number), he would do well to remember Frederick Douglas’s absolute horror at the thought of the government being there to help those people of color who, like Douglas, had suffered the horrible indignities, abuse, and impoverishment (both economic and moral) of slavery:

“What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!

I’m betting that quotation never makes it into one of Raskob’s classrooms.

Here’s the question Raskob and his ilk (Leftists are always part of an “ilk”) should ask themselves: If the American government has consistently discriminated against people of color since 1783, and that discrimination is so deeply embedded in the system that it managed to continue throughout the Obama era, why in the world would people of color think more government would help?

Government is the problem when it comes to racism, not the solution. After all, as I keep reminding Lefties, it was government (Democrat government) that enforced slavery and Jim Crow. Both would probably have died on the economic vine without government enforcing them, even on those who recognized them for the moral and economic disasters they were.

Raskob even has an unintentional good word for Jeff Sessions:

Sessions has overturned the policies of the Obama-era Department of Justice with striking efficiency. He rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program — leading to the current situation, in which thousands of Americans brought to the country as children are at risk of deportation if our famously responsive, highly functional Congress fails to act. He reversed the Obama administration’s laissez-faire approach toward marijuana in states that legalized the drug. No policy is too obscure for him to make it worse: he even retracted a 2016 Justice Department memo meant to curtail the use of debtors’ prisons. A Democratic attorney general can reinstate such policies, but in the meantime, countless lives will be ruined by Sessions’s senselessly punitive, discriminatory approach.

Heck, according to Raskob, Sessions is even more efficient than I gave him credit for. Mostly, as I see it, Sessions is enforcing laws as Congress wrote them, rather than as the Leftists wish Congress had written them. The former is the rule of law; the latter is banana republic stuff that leads to anarchy and strong men, social breakdown, gulags, death squads, etc.

The remainder of Raskob’s weepy (but heartening) screed is taken up with figuring out how to fight the Trump plague. What’s sad is that he, unlike Debbie Whatser-name-Schultz, has realized that the party he loves stands for . . . nothing, or at least nothing saleable. It needs to stand for something:

While criticizing Trump’s policies is necessary, it is hardly sufficient. As I have previously alluded, Democrats and the left must also articulate an alternative agenda.

After noting that the British Labor party (which Raskob probably doesn’t realize has a huge antisemitism problem) has managed to undercut Theresa May (whom Raskob doesn’t realize is left of center, as are all British Tories), Raskob has some concrete ideas for the Democrats. Oh, wait, he doesn’t. He speaks longingly of the Democrats “Better Deal” gimmick, which vanished as quickly as it came, but that’s it. Only when reading back up the column does Raskob seem to say that the only thing that will save Democrats is for them not to be Trump:

What do Trump’s policy successes mean for the opposition — or resistance, if you prefer? First and foremost, it must be political, a concept Democrats and liberals have had difficulty understanding in recent years. In this case, “doing politics” means persuading the majority of Americans that the Trump administration is making their lives worse and that the opposition will, if elected, wield power to make their lives better.

It goes without saying that Trump personally embodies virtually everything odious to people of humane and liberal sentiments. Nearly every vile prejudice is attributable to him. He is devoid of intellectual curiosity and believes his ignorance the height of knowledge. Lacking civic virtue, he uses his office to enrich himself and — in his more generous moods — his vacuous progeny.

Yet focusing primarily on Trump’s ignorance, vulgarity or violation of norms is a recipe for political disaster. After all, the number of people who are motivated to vote by such matters numbers somewhere around 30 or 40, and every one works for the editorial board of the Times or the Post. The majority of potential voters, by contrast, want something to vote for which will benefit themselves and their families.

And that is what you get for $52,000+ per year — someone who’s actually a little more intelligent than the average professional media reporter, but who is still so mired in fact-free, emotion-filled Leftist ideology that he’s incapable of seeing that what he writes makes no sense.

For example, Raskob imputes every manner of evil of Trump. Where his ideas don’t connect can be seen from the fact that, if Trump were as evil as Raskob claims, Raskop would be suffering the fate of Vida Movahed, the brave women in Iran who removed her head covering in a protest against the Mullahs. The Iranian guard, a sadistic, SS-like organization, hunted her down and she’s now rotting in prison. As a reminder, Obama made nice with the mullahs, giving them money and moral support. Trump has called them out for the evil beings they are.

Raskob might also want to ask himself why, if Trump is so vile, people of color other than myself are thriving in Trump’s America. There’s a reason black male support for Trump has doubled in a year. Thanks to him, they, their Hispanic brothers, and women of all colors are finally leaving behind the flaccid economy Obama visited upon America. If Trump were the racist Raskop claims, these people would be under siege, as blacks were in the Sudan, where the Arab Muslim government, after first slaughtering black Christians then turned its attention to slaughter black Muslims. Now that’s serious racism. The worst that Trump has done is . . . well, nothing, actually. The racism lives in the head of those obsessed with race, who pick up on dog whistles that live only in racist minds.

And lastly, Raskob might wonder in what universe a man as ignorant and stupid as Raskob contends Trump is somehow makes billions and, in the past year, has run rings around the many people who contend they’re so much smarter than Trump.

Raskob is young. Even though the expensive education he’s getting is removed from an actual, functioning world, there’s time for him to live and actually learn. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for him. After all, I was once Raskob, a knee-jerk Berkeley grad who had no actual knowledge — just a lot of second-hand bias, slogans, and a complete inability to apply reason to facts. Raskob can stay mired in the Stygian gloom of Leftism or, with luck, he can read, think, analysis, and examine other’s positions before blindly, like a miserable puppet jerking on a string, attacking what he neither knows nor understands.

Gawd, am I enjoying the Trump presidency. It’s not just what he’s doing, it’s that he’s doing with Conan the Barbarian’s vigor:

And honestly, whether it’s women or pajama boys doing the lamenting doesn’t matter to me. It’s enough just to hear those cries.

(And yes, I recognize that this post is truly tempting fate. I’ll just have to hope that, when it comes to the good of the United States, Fate is ignoring my pettiness and, instead, focusing on the fact that, after 26 years being subject to Democrats and “compassionate conservatives,” America is now on the upswing of Fortune’s Wheel and due for some good things — as is the rest of the world, the fate of which is so often tied to America’s well-being.)